Equity honoured for transformative work in Kenya

In a 286 page book, the World Bank has dedicated a chapter to commend the transformation of Equity Bank into a banking powerhouse with a Pan-African dimension and further urged other companies in the continent to adopt the model used by the bank.

The disclosure came yesterday when it unveiled a book based on Equity Bank’s successful turnaround strategy, in a bid to awaken Africas on the global economic stage.

Titled “Developing Africa’s Financial Services – The Importance of High Impact Entrepreneurship”, the book provides inspiring success stories of financial sector ventures making a lasting contribution to the economic development of various sub-Saharan African countries.

According to the book, sub-Saharan Africa presents an atmosphere highly conducive for crowd funding in supplying the capital needed for entrepreneurial ventures to grow.

Speaking yesterday, during the launch in Nairobi, Equity Bank chief executive James Mwangi (pictured left with World Bank’s Tana Redford) said the main challenge facing Kenya as a country is methods used to teach entrepreneurship in learning institutions.

“The challenge is not teaching entrepreneurship in universities but how we teach it in schools. This also affects policy making. In entrepreneurship, public policy should come in when there is market failure but the market should play the lead the rest of the time,” said Mwangi.

The book attributed Equity Bank’s success to its approach that centers on human capabilities acquisition, development, utilisation and maintenance model to build an entrepreneurial mindset and culture.

The book articulates how high impact entrepreneurs have on economic development of countries through economic growth, job, wealth creation and social transformation. Equity Bank has so far sponsored 15,168 wings to fly scholars, 10,920 university scholars and trained 36,166 entrepreneurs among other social-economic revolution activities.